AVI Systems serves customers with consistency, efficiency, and transparency

AVI Systems is the largest global systems integrator providing audio visual (AV) and unified communications (UC) solutions to organizations worldwide. The company is also the largest shareholder of GPA, a global provider that assisted with projects in 50 countries in 2022. AVI helps organizations of all sizes and across all industries improve communication and collaboration with innovative, unified solutions. With nearly 900 employees in 28 U.S. office locations, AVI Systems has designed, installed and supported AV, UC and digital media initiatives in the United States since 1974. 

“Our goal with every client is to help them engage and create human impact. We set up AV solutions in everything from typical conference rooms to stadiums, cafes, museums, and experience centers,” says Zach Valigura, Director of Delivery and Project Management Office (PMO) at AVI Systems. “We help our customers go global and standardize their AV installations across time zones in a consistent way.”

Bringing cohesion to complex projects

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies needed to add video-enabled solutions to their conference rooms so employees could meet whether they worked remotely or in the office. This created a huge work inflow for AVI Systems, which became difficult to manage for project and program managers. “It was a big logistics challenge to deploy everything on time,” explains Valigura. “We needed to coordinate with the customer’s internal teams such as IT, facilities, project management, and procurement to ensure all the dependencies were in place before our install began. Getting the information to the customers was only half the battle, we also needed to collect it. Meanwhile, our program managers had to make sure that projects were realized consistently across the globe.”

Without a centralized project management solution or collated data, AVI Systems faced many issues coordinating complex projects and standardizing them.

“When I started working at the company in November of 2021, I realized that all the information we needed was buried in emails and spreadsheets,” Valigura recalls. “We desperately needed a simple tracking sheet to organize everything.”

Valigura had already worked with Smartsheet in the past, so he decided to start tracking projects with it. “Only three people at our company had a license at the time,” he recalls. “Before I knew it, an IT specialist came to me and said: ‘Smartsheet is awesome! We’ve started using it to track our IT projects and we love it!’ While they had tried various other software over the years, they had never adopted them. Smartsheet, however, offered the feel of a familiar spreadsheet with the possibility for further use in project management.”

Empowered employees

Soon, AVI Systems came up with a more elaborate PMO solution by working closely with the Smartsheet team and ensuring that compliance and governance requirements were met. For AVI Systems project and program managers, the new solution has become the single source of truth where they can track projects, collect, visualize, and share information with their teams and customers. “We use everything from comprehensive dashboards, Control Centers, and Dynamic Views to pivots and calendars to give us clarity on what’s happening on our projects,” says Valigura. “Initially, we even tried to mimic the experience of a regular spreadsheet to give our employees a level of familiarity, using Data Shuttle to bring the data into Smartsheet. We’ve also relied on the DataMesh feature to map columns to different areas of the solution and create new sheets.” 

With the new PMO solution, AVI Systems’ employees are now better equipped to manage complex projects. “We rely on our project and program managers to guide our customers through their experience, and they in turn are completely enabled through Smartsheet,” adds Valigura.

“The biggest impact is the ability to organize mountains of data—we can create as many sheets as we want and tie them together with dashboards. Everybody knows exactly what’s going on in the company, we are an open book. And Smartsheet helps me avert a crisis almost every day.”

Satisfied, informed customers

AVI Systems has more than 520 projects across the globe open for its Enterprise Programs. With more transparent, better-managed projects, AVI Systems has built more trust with its customers. “What we’ve seen over the years is that if the customers don’t know what’s happening, they usually assume the worst,” says Valigura. “With Smartsheet, we’re giving them real-time updates. They can simply look at live dashboards and get real-time transparency in a custom format and use terms that are meaningful to them.”     

Representatives of the companies can then easily share the consolidated reports with their internal stakeholders and executives, saving about 4,000 hours a year on reporting for AVI’s teams, and about 20% of AVI’s customers time in gathering information. “Our customers frequently tell us that their internal communication has improved, saying ’people have stopped ringing me for updates’,” adds Valigura.

“Thanks to Smartsheet, we have outstanding success with guiding customers through their global deployments, which I never thought was possible. And we’re creating such an awesome, consistent experience that they don’t want to go anywhere else. By becoming a trusted partner, customers want to continue working with us—they are coming to us rather than us going to them, and that means growing recurring revenue.”    

Sharing the wins

Besides project management, Smartsheet has proven useful for other areas like finance management, operations management, and IT management. It has even helped the sales team in pitching for projects. “When I introduce our program management practices to potential customers, I pull up Smartsheet, share a live dashboard with their logo and anonymized data to give them a sense of what our deliverables look like,” explains Valigura. “In fact, customers are so impressed that they want their IT team to see our demo. It’s a great inspiration to explore new ways of working.”

Moving forward, AVI Systems will keep refining its project management practices and solutions and share them with GPA leaders across 26 regional business units located around the world. “Our number one goal is to make our approach helpful to project managers across the globe, help them stay organized, and provide transparency in our processes,” concludes Valigura.